Title: Why Do People Use Transit? Model for Explanation of Personal Attitude Toward Transit Service Quality
Abstract: This paper presents a critical investigation of reasons for using transit by the residents of the City of Calgary, Canada. Reasons of using transit are expressed as functions of peoples' perception and attitude towards transit service quality and attributes. A multinomial logit model combined with latent variable models is developed to capture unobserved latent variables in defining perceptions and attitude. Using a transit customer satisfaction survey data, conducted in 2007 by Calgary Transit authority, this approach models the reasons of choosing transit and tests the significance of two individual specific latent variables: perceptions of 'reliability and convenience' and 'ride comfort'. It reveals many behavioral details that have important policy implications. Most importantly, it is found that the people of Calgary value 'reliability and convenience' over 'ride comfort'. As for policy implications of the findings, it is clear that improving connectivity of train service, reducing multimodal transfers, and increasing dedicated right-of-way for transit would effectively increase transit ridership in Calgary. In terms of application of passively collected data source, this paper shows how non-research oriented survey data can be used to unravel many behavioral details and policy relevance.
Publication Year: 2009
Publication Date: 2009-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 1
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